Setting up this feature will allow your practioners to receive commission based on various types of treatments they conduct in an individual basis. The guide will firstly take you over the process of setting up a basic overall commission for your practioner. The 2nd section will take you through the individual commission rates for each of your practioners. Finally we’ll take you through the commission reports so you can see exactly who has received which types of commission rates that you setup.
When setting up commission rates, there are two areas where you can actually set this up, although each area differs in respect of what can actually be done. Firstly we will deal with the area to setup an overall commission rate on everything your specific practioner is associated with.
Note: This method is not recommended for practices that have more than just treatments setup on their system, as setting an overall commission rate will give your practioner commission on sundry items amongst other types of treatments and stock items. Please refer to Section 2 – Individual Commission Rates for a more details commission rate setup.
- Firstly go to the PPS Menu > Tools > Setup System Users.
- In here you need to select your client and click on Modify.
- You can they set the overall commission rate on all appointments and charges raised with this practioner in the User Set Up area of the User Profiles screen. Once done you can click on Save to close. Please refer to the note at the start of section 1 before proceeding with this to clarify that this is what you require.
Note: Before progressing, it is worth noting that to setup commission rates on an individual basis your treatment charges should all have charge types assigned to them. You can check this by going to your Standard Charges and Stock items menu in Look up Tables and making sure everything has the “Type“ column filled in.
- The 2nd area whereby commission rates can be set up is a more versatile and customised setup for your practioners. In the PPS Menu > Tools > Look up tables.
- In here under the Accounts Tables section will be the "practioner commission rates". Click on this then click on the Open button.
- From here you can see any existing Practioner Commission Rates that have been previously setup, along with the ability to Modify or Delete them if needed. From this screen though you will need to click on the Add button.
- There will be 3 field boxes to be utilised here. Firstly the Practioner box requires you to select your specified practioner that requires the commission; secondly you will need to select your charge type that the practioner will receive commission on E.G. General Treatments, Acupuncture or Hydrotherapy. Finally you require to input the percentage that your practioner will receive for this treatment type.
- Once this has been done simply click on Save and this will apply the commission to the practioner. You can assign as many rates to as many practioners as you want to. Any treatment types not inputted for commission will stay the same. This way if a client also has a sundry item added to his overall invoice, the practioner will not receive any commission on that item.
Accounts The PPS Accounts system includes facilities for you to bill your clients, or third parties, record payments received, and manage all invoices that are overdue for payment. In addition, PPS also offers an additional module called PPS Expense that can be used to record details of practice expenditure. The Accounts system in PPS is not designed to be a full accounts system with ledgers, balance sheets, etc. but it can be used to supply revenue and expenditure information directly to another accounts system by way of exporting the information through reports.
PPS Accounts billing is structured into three areas: Charges, Invoices and Payments. Firstly Charges must be created, then an invoice produced, then a payment recorded. A Charge, or charges simply become “line items” on an invoice, and a payment recorded is “allocated” to the invoice. PPS is flexible enough to accommodate all requirements for practice billing including third-party billing, split billing (between client and third party), recording several payments against one invoice, or recording one payment against several invoices. There are various points throughout PPS that enable charges to be quickly created and “paid off” in one step. This single step still produces the correct Charge, Invoice and Payment records. Add Look this up under the type of new record you want to add – e.g. Client - Add or Appointment - Add Charge A charge is the first step for PPS billing. You have to create a charge before you can raise an invoice – a charge is a “line item” on an invoice. Charges can be either for various types of treatment, or for stock/sundry items you may sell. PPS has a “list of standard charges” that you set up yourself giving you quick access to your charges via a code, or description. There are several ways in PPS that you can create a charge, you can also skip very quickly from creating a charge to recording a payment and PPS creates the invoice for you as you go.
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You can create a charge in the following ways (which way you regularly use will depend upon the way that you prefer to use PPS): 1) from the PPS Menu: Accounts – Create a Charge; 2) from the PPS Taskbar click on Create a Charge (if you have the diary open then highlighting an appointment first will create the charge related to that appointment); 3) from the PPS Menu: Accounts – Charges List, and click the New button; 4) from the diary, highlight an appointment, right-click on the appointment and select the Client Charge option from the pop-up menu; 5) when completing a consultation record, the “consultation complete” screen allows you to create the charge; 6) when completing an appointment the “appointment complete” screen allows you to create the charge; 7) Cash Desk can be used to create charges. The first four options above will show the Client Charge screen. This allows you to select / enter all the appropriate charge details and save the charge, or go on to create an invoice for the charge. An invoice can contain more than one charge so you do not always want to create the invoice each time.
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Whenever creating a charge, you have the option to select who will be invoiced for the charge, this includes the Client, and any one of the Third-Part Contacts associated with the client. This is how to bill an insurance company directly, for example. If the client does not have a third party contact associated with them, then you can select one while creating the charge, and select to always associate this third-part with the client. This will update the third-party contact details for you on the Main Client Details screen. Client Client records are the hub of your PPS database. PPS refers to these records as “Clients” rather than “Patients” because PPS is used across a variety of business and clinical disciplines, some of whom use the term “client” and others use “patient”. A client record can have either minimal details entered, such as first name and surname, or can be a comprehensive range of details including full address/contact details, alternative addresses, DOB, sex, “known as”, full profile details including “source of introduction”, occupation (plus a range of entries you can set up yourself). In addition you can associate a variety of third-parties to clients such as doctors, insurance companies, etc. The more comprehensive the details you store for each client, the greater the opportunities to use these details in your reports and mail-merge operation. For example, by recording the “source of introduction” for each client (such as yellow pages, local advert, recommendation, etc.) you can run almost any report in PPS to show a breakdown by “source of introduction”, for example “practice revenue” by “source of introduction” will show where you earn the most money from – thus where you should concentrate most on your advertising! Commission You can set up various commission rates for your practitioners, if they earn different levels of commission for different types of treatments or stock items. You List of Standard Charges and Stock Items in PPS can be grouped into different “types” – this entry is available on the Standard Charges and Stock Items Look up Table. You can set up different commission rates for each Practitioner / Type combination. The Practitioner Commission Rates is a Look up Table where you can set up your various rates. The Practitioner Commission Report then uses these commission rates against all charges that have been created to show the commission due in any given period. See: Practitioner Commission Report for more details. Delete Delete is the term used to remove any record or file in PPS. Most “data entry” type screens will include a Delete button on the toolbar. You can use this button to delete the currently displayed record. There are various restrictions placed on deleting records in certain parts of the system. For example you cannot delete a client record if accounts records exist for that client. The System Administrator can also decide which PPS Users are allowed to delete which type of records. This is set up as part of the User Profile for each user – see: Access Control for more details. Details This is a generic term used to describe the information stored in any particular part of PPS. For example Main Client Details is the information you enter to this screen. In addition, there are several “notes” type fields that allow you to enter further “free text” details against a record – these are also sometimes referred to as Details. Invoice An Invoice in PPS is an official bill that can be issued for payment by a client. In accounting terms an “Invoice” and “Receipt” is the same thing – a receipt is a printed copy of a “paid” invoice. The invoice has an invoice number and a date for tax purposes. PPS keeps a “ledger” of all invoices, and allows you to print an aged debtors report. An Invoice is formed from individual “line items” which in PPS are called Charges, so an invoice can only be raised after charges have been created. An invoice is “paid off” by recording a Payment and allocating the payment to the invoice. PPS is very flexible in terms of allowing either one charge, or an unlimited number of charges to appear on the invoice; also to allow either one payment to pay off one invoice, or one payment to pay off more than one invoice, or several payments to pay off one invoice. There are several ways to raise an invoice in PPS, some of these are fairly transparent in term of creating the charge, raising the invoice and recording the payment all in one step. Whichever method is used, PPS will always create proper Charge, Invoice and Payment records. Look Up Tables Look up Tables are used in PPS to control the entries that are allowed in certain fields. This means that you can restrict what values are input to just those that you want recorded. For example, when adding a new appointment, the “Appointment Type” look up table can contain entries such as “Initial Assessment”, “New Patient” or “Hydrotherapy”. This helps when running reports as you can select to break down the results of your report by the look up table entry thus minimising the number of different entries (especially slight variations of spellings!).
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Some Look Up tables will store additional default values. For example the “Appointment Type” table can optionally have a Charge Codes associated with each entry. When the selected entry is used for an appointment, the charge code will be automatically selected for you when you create the charge for the appointment.
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Look Up Tables are set up and maintained using the PPS Menu: Tools – Look Up Tables.
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You can control which of your PPS users has access to setting up and maintaining Look Up Tables as part of the PPS Access Control system.
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Also see the entry under the name of each Look Up Table e.g. Occupation Modify This is the term used throughout PPS to “change” any of your existing records. PPS has buttons on many screens with a <Modify> prompt. Clicking this button will normally take you onto a further screen that allows you to modify the selected details. For more information about modifying various types of record in PPS, see the “modify” entry under the various section of this help guide, for example Invoices – Modify, Appointments – Modify, etc. Open Some screens in PPS have an “Open” button on the toolbar, this is very similar to the Modify button as it will “open” the selected record for “modification”. PPS PPS is the acronym for “Private Practice Software”. Reports PPS includes many different reports that you can run that present information accumulated from various parts of the system. There are two main reports options: Summaries and Statistics, and PPS Reports and Mail Merge. In addition to these two main options, there is a variety of other print-outs that you can produce from PPS that are not included in the category of reports. These include: Printing the Diary, Client Details, Medical History and Clinical Notes. You can access the PPS reports options from the PPS Menu: Reports. For more details about the Statistics & Summaries type reports, see: Statistics & Summaries. When you select the PPS Reports & Mail Merge option, a reports selection screen appears – this screen is divided into the various categories of reports that you can run. Most reports (certainly client-based reports) can also be used for mail merge purposes. Select a report from any of the categories and use either the Run option (see: Reports – Run) or the Open option (see: reports – Open). When you select Open, you will be guided through the Report Wizard (see: Report Wizard) to allow you to make your specific selections for the report before choosing a report output option (see: Reports – Report Output). See also: various entries in this reference guide under Reports for further details. For details of individual reports, see: the entry under the report name, for example Charges Report or Aged Debtors Report. Save PPS Uses a <Save> button on many screens. This will save the updates that you have made to this screen and store them permanently in your database. One some screens the <Save> button will also close the screen. Select A term used when you choose something on the screen. Some PPS screens have a <Select> button, this normally means that you pick an option, or entry in a list, then click the <Select> button. This will “select” your chosen entry and proceed to the next screen, or return to the previous screen with your chosen entry selected. Set Up See: Medical History – Setting Up; PPS – Setting Up; Custom Form – Maintenance; Users – Setting Up; Letterhead – Set Up This Treatment See: Clinical Notes Summary User Profiles User Profiles describes information about each PPS user. This is any person who either needs to log in to PPS or is a practitioner in your clinic, or has a diary. For more details about User Profiles, see: Users – Setting Up.
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